


Exquisite Corpse

by Energybeing



Series: Immortal Hand [3]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-14 12:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5743078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Energybeing/pseuds/Energybeing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All that matters is the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Buffy or Doctor Who. Please don’t sue me for using them.
> 
> This story is the sequel to and set immediately after ‘Speech of the Devil’.

Author’s note: I do not own Buffy or Doctor Who. Please don’t sue me for using them.

This story is the sequel to and set immediately after ‘Speech of the Devil’.

~*~

The Doctor was moving around the TARDIS, flipping switches, pushing buttons. The actions themselves were much like they were every time he flew the TARDIS, and yet there wasn’t the usual exploratory exuberance that generally accompanied this. He moved slowly. He looked thoughtful.

Amy, eventually, asked the question that no one was asking. “Who was she? The blonde woman. Who… _what_ was she?”

The Doctor didn’t answer. He paused briefly to look at her, even opened his mouth to speak, but at the last moment he thought better of it and closed it again. With a final switch, the TARDIS was in motion, the central column moving and the familiar and oddly soothing wheezing sound echoing around them.

Amy decided that, given that it looked like the Doctor wasn’t going to answer that question, she might as well ask another. Usually, the Doctor loved to talk. “What about the TARDIS, then? She said you were going to fix it, but… it looks like you're just doing the same things you normally do. Is the TARDIS going to explode or something? And why is he here?”

The last question was accompanied by a gesture to a Roman centurion, who looked more hurt by the question and less awed by being in a box that was bigger on the inside than one might expect.

“Ah yes.” The Doctor said slowly. “That would be Rory. Take a good look at Rory. I don’t think he’ll mind.” He rocked back on his heels. “Certain of it, actually. Good, good, you’re doing that and you're not paying even the slightest bit of attention to me. Just like old times.” The Doctor finished. “Ah. We’re here.”

“Where?” Rory asked, without looking away from Amy.

“Not sure. Somewhere interesting. Come on!” The Doctor moved to the doors and flung them wide open.

They went and had some adventures, although they didn’t have the slightest idea what sort of adventures they were going to have, or when, or where. They travelled the universe on the whim of a machine, until the Doctor decided that enough was enough and that Amy and Rory should really go back to Leadworth and finally get married. They’d already had enough problems on that front, what with Rory getting written out of reality and coming back as a Roman for no reason the Doctor could grasp. So he dropped them back home on the night before their wedding.

He promised fervently that he would be back in time for the wedding itself. Given that he had a time machine, he was fairly certain that he was telling the truth. He’d gotten better at aiming. Slightly. A little bit.

So the Doctor dropped them off in their home town and went off somewhere. He didn’t know where he was going, but there was nothing new in that. In fact, if he knew where he was going-

There was a moment, lasting less than a fraction of a second, when the TARDIS and everything in it suddenly seemed to become infinitely flat, infinitely long and also rather crooked. Before there was even a chance to register this, however, the moment had passed.

-it made the whole thing a lot less interesting.

Apparently, the Doctor had ended up on Earth. He could tell that by the atmosphere, by the feel of time on his skin and the world moving beneath his feet. There was nothing about the buildings around him that seemed particularly interesting, but the Doctor paid them no heed.

Looming in front of him was some kind of structure, a tower in the centre of the square. It seemed as though it was held together more by rust than by good workmanship. It seemed to sway gently in the wind. More than that, though, there was something almost magnetic about it. The Doctor’s gaze skated over the surrounding buildings but always came back to the tower. His eyes kept returning to it, even though he didn’t intend them to do so.

After a few moments, the Doctor shrugged and went exploring. 

The moment that he turned around, he was confronted by a statue of an angel standing behind him. It was so close that it could have reached out and touched him with no effort whatsoever, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was a statue. Of course, just because it looked like a statue didn't mean that it was.

It looked like a Weeping Angel. It had the wings and everything. But it didn’t have its hands in front of its eyes, and its arms dangled harmlessly by its sides. They hadn’t turned into claws, and the face wasn’t twisted into a snarl. It looked, all things considered, like a statue.

Except the Doctor didn’t think that it had been there before.

The Doctor back away slowly until he left the square. He pressed his back against the wall, waited a few seconds, and then poked his head around the corner again.

The statue was still there. It hadn’t moved at all. Those few seconds would be more than enough for an angel to get away, if it had wanted to, and there was no one else watching it. When no one watched an angel, it was free to do whatever it liked. Given the things that it liked, it was therefore generally a better idea to keep an eye on them.

Unless, of course, it was just a statue. A creepy statue. Maybe it had been there before. He’d been distracted by the odd magnetism of the tower – he could have just completely failed to see it. It wouldn’t have been the first time something like that had happened.

“What are you looking at?” A voice said behind him. The Doctor turned instinctively to see a man looking at him curiously. Realising what he’d just done, he turned back to the square.

The statue was gone.

“Nothing. I’m just a little lost.”

“Oh? Maybe I can help with that.” Suddenly the man sprouted fangs and his eyes were yellow and he was lunging for the Doctor who was already running.

He didn’t run far. He ran, in fact, straight into a dead end. The creature, whatever it was, seemed to take great pleasure in that. It advanced slowly on the Doctor.

And then it was gone, and there was a statue standing where it had been, its hand outstretched with a single finger extended. Even now, it still looked peaceful, a far cry from the usual expression of an angel in such a situation.

A young woman appeared at the elbow of the statue. She looked as though she was perhaps fifteen, until you looked more closely and saw that she was much too weary for someone that young. Until you noticed that her eyes were hooded, as though she couldn’t quite bring herself to open them fully. “You new in town?”

The Doctor nodded.

“Thought as much. No one goes out after dark any more. Not even now.”

“That thing… what was it?” The Doctor asked. He wondered if it was worth asking the woman why she was out after dark herself.

The woman smiled faintly. The Doctor got the distinct impression that that was about all the amusement that she could muster. “Vampire. You really walked into the wrong town. I’d suggest that you leave again and… well, you probably won’t have trouble forgetting. Something like this tends to be too incredible to remember.”

“A… vampire.” The Doctor paused. “Are we talking about the kind of vampire who needs invitations to get in, gets scared away by crosses, that kind of thing?”

“Got it in one. Anyway, like I said, you should leave. The angels can’t save everyone.”

Vampires. That was… interesting. The Doctor knew vampires. Every Time Lord did. They were quite literally the stuff of legends. If that had been a vampire, then he would have known about it. He would have felt it in his bones. He also knew that vampires weren’t scared by crosses and could enter dwellings without being invited. There was no race he knew of, none whatsoever, that acted like that. Certainly not one that lived on Earth in small town America.

And then there was the tower, and the angel...

The Doctor rummaged in his pocket for a second, pulled out a piece of chalk and tossed it to the woman. She caught it instinctively and then looked at it in surprise.

“Would you mind drawing something for me? Anything will do.” The Doctor said, and then calmly walked past her and the angel and back into the square. He went back into his TARDIS, and the woman rounded the corner just in time to see it vanish. She looked at the now-empty space where it had stood, then shrugged and drew a rather wonky circle on the floor. She stood and waited.

Nothing happened for several minutes. After that, nothing happened. Eventually the woman got bored and left, taking the chalk with her.

The TARDIS reappeared about a minute after that, and promptly vanished again. This cycle repeated several times. Eventually the Doctor got out and looked thoughtfully at the tower.

It wasn’t just his gaze that the tower attracted. It also seemed to draw his TARDIS in. Oh, he could leave, he could go anywhere he wanted… but the next time he travelled, he always ended up right there, on that very spot.

And that very spot was interesting in itself, because it didn’t exist. According to the TARDIS, there was nothing there. That is not to say that the TARDIS didn’t recognise the world that, according to every sense the Doctor had, seemed to be the Earth. When the TARDIS was there, in front of the tower, it didn’t even recognise the universe. All it saw was emptiness.

The Doctor wondered where he was.

And then he looked down, and saw the chalk mark on the ground which told him that he’d gotten the time right (although he suspected that the tower had more to do with that than his piloting skills).

But the wobbly circle wasn’t the only thing on the ground. There was also a message.

__

Do you know us?


	2. Chapter Two

The Doctor knelt down in front of the message and rubbed gently at the chalk. He did the same for the wonky circle. They were both made by the same chalk. He then proceeded to taste it, thereby establishing that they'd both been drawn at almost exactly the same time, give or take a few minutes. The chalk itself was nowhere to be seen.

He stood back and looked at the message again. The writing was unusual, in that every word, every _letter_ was evenly spaced, and the repeated letters looked identical. Every word was the same size. The message looked, all in all, more like something written by a machine than by a person.

Then, and only then, did the Doctor begin to wonder who had written it.

He doubted that it would be a vampire. While he did know vampires, he certainly didn’t know these ones. He was fairly certain that he wasn’t even in his own universe, given the TARDIS’ generally incapability to locate… well, _everything_. Anyway, given that the only vampire he had met was now somewhere in the past, courtesy of the angel, he didn’t think that one of them would be leaving him a message.

As for the angel itself… the last time he had encountered an angel it had killed someone and used his voice to communicate. They really weren’t the kind of creatures to leave inquisitive chalk notes.

_The angels can’t save everyone._

The girl had said that. The girl with the tired eyes. She had seemed to think that the angels were good. Maybe the Doctor really had stumbled into a completely different universe, one with storybook vampires and genuine guardian angels. But then, neither of them would be asking him if he knew them.

_Don’t you recognise us, Doctor?_

The voice echoed in his head, as it had since he had heard her speak. The person who he had tried to forget, the person that he had tried so hard not to think about. The Beast. The blonde girl. Buffy. But, again, written notes didn’t seem exactly her style. She liked to be face to face, so that you could hear her voice and her words could worm their way into your head, so that you went about your daily life with the thought that you were the most dangerous creature in the universe playing in the back of your mind…

The Doctor stood there with the voice of a blonde girl echoing in his mind, until he was interrupted by a shout. “Hey! You shouldn’t be here! It’s after dark!”

The Doctor turned around to see a young man making his way towards him. He was probably in his early twenties, and although he looked ostensibly cheerful there was something behind his eyes that looked old and tired. “You know, you’re the second person to say that to me today.” The Doctor said slowly.

“Oh. You’re the man with the magic box.”

“Yes, I suppose I…” the Doctor paused. There was something about what the man had just said. Not the obvious implication that the woman he had met earlier had told other people about him, but rather his intonation. Generally, when people saw the TARDIS and thought it was magic, they spoke of it in hushed, awed tones. They didn’t talk about it as though it was just kind of mundane. “Yes, that’s me.”

“We’d like to talk to you for a bit.” The man shot a glance at the TARDIS as though expecting it to do something. “Ask some questions. Explain a few things.”

“Fantastic! I love explanations. It’s always nice when everything makes sense.” The Doctor said cheerfully. “On the other hand, though, what would you do if I said that I didn’t want to go with you?”

The man shrugged easily. “Probably not a lot.”

“Good answer. _Good_ answer. Let’s go.”

“So, your box. What does it do?”

“I travel in it.”

The other man mused that over for a bit. He didn’t find it as hard to swallow as most people seemed to. “Isn’t it a bit small?”

“You’d be surprised. Speaking of, where exactly am I?”

“Sunnydale.” The Doctor paused, waiting expectantly for the man to continue. “California.”

Okay. So he was on Earth. He’d thought as much. It also seemed to be an Earth where magic, or at least something _called_ magic, seemed fairly commonplace. And also somewhere where the TARDIS couldn’t find anything, no space-time coordinates of any kind, positive or negative. The universe just didn’t seem to exist. Which was odd, given that a brief look up revealed plenty of stars in the sky, even with the light from all the lampposts. The universe was clearly out there, but for some reason the TARDIS couldn’t see it.

“So, these things that you want to explain to me, I'm guessing they're probably pretty urgent?”

The other man snorted. “You could say that. If you happen to be the kind of magic user who wants to cause trouble, this is just about the worst town in the world for you to try.”

“Right, right. So while you’re obviously anxious to explain exactly why that is, could you also explain why it is that we seem to be going in circles? You keep stopping and then going back down the same streets.”

The other man paused. His eyes glazed over slightly. “I’m going a roundabout route so that you don’t know where we are.”

“I don’t know where we are anyway. I told you that I just arrived.” The Doctor looked at the other man intently. Something was going on here. Something besides the TARDIS malfunction, the vampires and the angels. Something had just made the man say that. The Doctor doubted that the other man even knew – he probably thought that it had been his own idea. But something was going on here, something behind the scenes.

“So have we.” The man said, stopping outside a building bearing the enigmatic emblem of 'The Runic Bag', alongside a stylized depiction of the eponymous object. “Welcome to the shop.”

It was, the Doctor soon discovered, a magic shop. Looking around, the Doctor saw various items that purported to have magical effects. All in all, it looked like the kind of shop you could see on hundreds of worlds, selling tat to gullible tourists.

At least, that was what it looked like. A footprint doesn’t look like a boot. The Doctor withheld his assumptions.

The other man led him into a room in the back. There were people in it, three women that the Doctor had never seen before and the young girl with the blue eyes which he had. The three women said, almost in unison, “Who are you?”

The young woman just stood, put a hand in her pocket, and said “I think I have something of yours.” Then she proceeded to completely and utterly fail to find the piece of chalk that she had put in there earlier.


	3. Chapter One

The Doctor backed away slowly until he left the square. He pressed his back against the wall, waited a few seconds, and then was struck by the feeling that he had done this all before. Part of him, the larger, told him that of course he hadn’t, that he had only just left his TARDIS, that he had only just seen the angel. And yet, for some reason, he couldn’t quite seem to shake the idea that he had in fact been through this exact same moment before.

“I feel what’s to happen, all happened before.” The Doctor turned to see a woman with dark hair, dark eyes and a dark dress regarding him. “Do you know us?”

“No.” The Doctor replied, looking at her intently. Her eyes were very wide. They weren’t really dark. They were in fact fairly pale blue. He couldn’t quite fathom why he had thought that they were dark. “Who are you?”

“Different circumstances.” The woman spoke plainly, as though that was an answer that not only made perfect sense but made all other questions unnecessary.

_Look for me under different circumstances._

“Ah. You’re so full of words, just waiting to spill out. All of them, all the languages, dancing on the tip of your tongue. Let us put some of them to bed, shall we?” The woman said. Her voice was soft, and lilting. In fact, she seemed to be having some difficulty speaking audibly, and the Doctor made an unconscious step nearer to her. “You can call me Drusilla. I won’t ask you your name, because that isn’t important. It’s the answer to an entirely different question. There’s a new question, the question of the moment. A moment, that is, not necessarily this one. What can’t you do without a voice?”

“Normally, I’m all for riddles. Big fan. Questions are great. Once had a jumper covered in question marks. But right now, there’s something going on, and I don’t have the-“

“-time?” Drusilla finished for him. “You need to listen more, nameless man. You're too concerned with your own legend to listen to anyone else. You’ve gotten too… big. And you have all the time, all the time you need. Exactly that much time. We’re waiting.”

“Who are you?” the Doctor said again. “I don’t mean what are you called. Who are you? What’s going on?”

“Our story was told long ago, nameless man. Our story is about the hunger that drives us. Each of us has a hunger, you know. For blood or cruelty or something else entirely. We just keep hungering for that single thing. Everything else is… dead, to us. Our story isn’t the important one.” Drusilla put a hand to her mouth and gave a short, feminine giggle. “Oh! I think I’ve just given you a clue.”

The Doctor had once accidentally stumbled across a pocket universe where the fictional reigned supreme. It wasn’t inconceivable that he had wandered into a similar place. It would explain why the TARDIS couldn’t see the universe – if the story said that it couldn’t, then it couldn’t. Now, as then, it was probably a good idea to play along until he figured out all the rules. “A story. If you don’t have a voice, then you can’t tell a story.”

“Very good, nameless man. You’re catching on now. And if you can’t tell your own story, then that means that they have to be waiting for a storyteller.”

_We aim to be the storyteller…_

The Doctor realised something. At no point had Drusilla actually _said_ that her name was Drusilla. Only that he could call her that. And she kept talking in the plural. “You’re not really called Drusilla, are you?”

Suddenly Drusilla’s eyes went yellow and her teeth grew into fangs, and the Doctor was too close to her to run. He was in her grasp, and her mouth was so close to his ear that he could her hear whisper in the quietest of voices “Ask them about the angels. They’re waiting for their story, nameless man.” And then she stepped away, and her face was human again, and the Doctor realised that not once, not even when her mouth had been right next to his ear, had he felt her breathe. “Our story is done, nameless man, and it won’t change now. We’re just waiting for the next story to be told.” She paused. “If time breaks and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you remember nothing else, remember that. The question of the other moment.”

And then the universe broke apart, pieces of it shattering like glass and burning like worlds, and behind it there was a great thing without shape or colour or form, an indescribable amalgam of fear and hatred and rage and void, and behind all of that was a single idea waiting patiently for a mind to think it, waiting as people, worlds, entire galaxies tumbled into it, and even then it wasn’t satisfied.

Then it was over. The universe was back, whole and undamaged, but it wasn’t quite the same. Buildings weren’t in the same places that they used to be. The Doctor was standing in the square, beneath the tower, rather than in a road leading off of it. Drusilla was gone as though she had never been there. The Doctor stood there and felt as though there was a bruise on his mind, on his soul, and he stood there shaking and he couldn’t stop.


	4. Chapter Two

Eventually, the Doctor stopped shaking and straightened. He had no idea how long he had been standing there, and he was absolutely certain that that question didn’t matter.

He could feel time. All Time Lords can. They can feel it passing over their skin like a gentle breeze. They can see moments in flux and fixed moments and everything in between. For them, it was as simple as standing there.

And, standing there, the Doctor could feel that something was terribly wrong with time. It was still moving, that much was true. It continued flowing at the same speed which it had before. But it flowed in from different pasts, pasts which hadn’t happened until right at that very moment, at which point they had always been, and the past that he remembered, the past which should have happened, was lost. And so, standing there, the Doctor watched as the buildings flickered and changed, as he stood on the pavement – on the street – in the square – on a bridge – on the pavement. The only thing that was solid and unchanging was the tower.

Something was very wrong with time, and it was causing him physical pain to stand there while the past changed over and over again.

_If time breaks and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?_

Only he could tell, he knew. The boy who had led him to the magic shop – the reason that he had doubled back on himself so many times was because he had been walking down roads that no longer existed, taking paths that no one had ever made. They all belonged to an orphaned past, a fragment with no future. Far from taking the road less travelled, he’d tried to take one which, now, had never been there at all.

And that was just the beginning. It was speeding up, now, as much as these things could. Time was breaking, and he was the only one who noticed. Maybe that was why he was here. It was as good an explanation as any. It might even go some to way to explaining why the TARDIS couldn’t see the universe. If time was breaking, then it would be even more affected than he was. Plus, what with the relationship between time and space-

“You new in town?”

It was the woman that the Doctor had briefly met before. The one who had had his chalk and then, suddenly, never had. She was wearing different clothes than she had been before, and her hair was shorter, but the eyes were the same. They were too tired for someone that young.

The Doctor decided to skip the pleasantries. “I need to know about the angels.”

The woman tilted her head and looked at him. Her expression didn’t change, but there was a strong impression that she was sizing him up. “Why?” Her tone was guarded.

“Because, if they’re what I think they are, then they are very, very dangerous. Something is happening and they are right in the middle of it. Them and this tower.”

At the mention of the tower, the girl flinched slightly. She looked at it as though she couldn’t avoid doing so, even though every instinct in her was telling her not to look. She went pale, paler even than before. “You’ve seen them before. The angels.”

The Doctor nodded. “Yes. I think so. Somewhere… far away. They killed a lot of people. Please, can you tell me what you know?”

_Ask them about the angels._

“You know, the people in this town call them guardian angels?” The woman said in a tone of such bitter derision that the Doctor wondered what could possibly have happened to this woman, this girl of barely fifteen, that made her sound so old. “After the fire, and... after she left, everything’s been pretty quiet. Only the vampires have been active, and that’s because most of them are too stupid to figure out what will happen when she gets back. But when they hunt, when they’re about to kill – there they are. The angels. They touch them and they’re gone. The vampires. We don’t know what happens to them. No one ever sees the angels move. They’re just there, just in the nick of time. Guardian angels, saving people from the vampires.”

“You sound like that isn’t a good thing.” The Doctor said gently.

The woman shrugged angrily. “Yeah, well. We have a bad track record with things that seem like they want to keep the town safe. We keep an eye on them.”

“You don’t trust them.” The Doctor said. He didn’t mention that keeping an eye on something that could be half way on the other side of town in the blink of an eye was futile. It would take more than one person to guard against a Weeping Angel. “Even though they seem to be saving people. Why?”

“Because she made them.”

“Who?” No one made the Weeping Angels. They weren’t made. They were ideas, ideas that had taken form. They weren’t made any more than a TARDIS was.

She looked at him incredulously. “You really don’t know, do you? You must be really new. Well, trust me when I say that the best thing for you would be to get so far away from this town that to get any farther away you’d start coming back. And maybe even that isn’t far enough.”

“Who is she?”

“My sister.” She said, as though that explained everything, as though there was not only nothing more that needed to be said but that that was all that _could_ be said. As though everything the Doctor needed to know was contained in those two words.

The Doctor stood up. He hadn’t been sitting a moment earlier, hadn’t even been inside, but not only was he there now but he had been for the past half hour or so. The conversation he had had outside in the square was just a fragment lost in time – now he’d had a slightly different conversation in a different place with girl with different clothes and different hair and different makeup but the same old eyes.

And then, before the Doctor had a chance to say anything else, there was a knock at the door.


	5. Lost Chapter

The Doctor was moving around the TARDIS, flipping switches, pushing buttons. The actions themselves were much like they were every time he flew the TARDIS, and yet there was a distracted air about him. He didn’t seem to be paying even the slightest attention to what he was doing. He seemed to be operating on autopilot. Certainly, he wasn’t doing anything that could be construed as repairing the TARDIS. He looked like he was preparing to fly the TARDIS, or failing that just doing something to occupy his hands while his mind was elsewhere.

“Uh, Doctor?” Amy said gently. “Are you okay?” She thought that it was probably a good idea to start small. The Doctor normally loved to talk. Once he started, maybe she could find out who that scary blonde had been, and figure out what was going on with the TARDIS.

Except the Doctor didn’t give even the slightest indication that he had heard her. He just kept moving, slowly. Given that nothing seemed to be happening, it appeared as though he was doing it more to reassure himself that everything was still there than to actually fly away.

“Is the Tardis okay? It isn’t going to…” she paused, urgently looking for a different way to end to sentence. She couldn’t. “…explode?”

“No.” The Doctor said. He didn’t look at her – in fact, if it hadn’t been for the fact that he had just answered her question, Amy would have doubted that he had heard her at all. He didn’t stop moving, didn’t stop… whatever he was doing.

“So you’ve fixed it then?”

“No. She wasn’t broken. Not really.”

“Then why-“ 

“I’m the last of my kind, Amy.” He looked at her then, and she saw the person that she’d only caught glimpses of before. The person who wasn’t her rather eccentric friend, not her raggedy man, but rather the alien. The man who had lived for more than a thousand years before he had ever met her. The stranger who looked like a human, but couldn’t possibly be more other-worldly. “So is she. We are, both of us, the last members of a dead planet. There are none of us left. All the life in the galaxy, everywhere you look, and we are always, _always_ alone.”

“You’re not-“

“The thing about the Pandorica, Amy, is that it’s a perfect prison. Nothing gets out. But, in this case, more importantly, nothing gets in. Have you ever wondered why, everywhere you go, everyone always speaks English? It’s because of the TARDIS. She translates automatically in your head. Just a tiny little psychic link, that’s all, so that you can understand what’s going on. So that you can travel the universe and have every language on the tip of your tongue. And that’s the tiniest fraction of what the TARDIS can do. Think what it’s like for me. We’ve been together for millennia. We’ve travelled to the end of the universe, and through all of that, it’s been us two. Me and her. Others come, others go, but only we stay constant. So tell me, Amy, what would you do if the last remnant of your planet, if your constant companion, your best friend, if all of that was going to be ripped away from you… tell me, Amy, wouldn’t you tear the universe apart rather than face an eternity of complete and utter soul-crushing loneliness? Tell me, Amy, what would you do?”

He didn’t wait for a response, which was just as well. She didn’t think that she could have spoken then to save her life. She could barely even think. She just stood there, trying to wrap her mind across a loneliness so vast-

And then a crack opened in the middle of the room, a crack in space, in time, in reality itself, and everything died.


	6. Last Chapter

“Tell us about ourselves.”

The Doctor blinked. He was standing in the burnt wreckage of a house. He remembered walking there and deciding to poke around because the ruin didn’t seem to fit into the small town American image that the rest of the town seemed so keen on pretending to be. He also remembered that, up to about a second ago, none of that had actually happened. Now, of course, that had always been what had happened.

He also remembered seeing the man in front of him. He had taken him for a statue, at first. Not because it looked like he was made out stone, but because he sat so still. He didn’t breathe, he didn’t blink. There was no flush of blood in his face as his heart beat. The breeze didn’t even stir his clothes. He just sat there, on a burnt chair that was so damaged that it looked like it couldn’t possibly hold his weight.

“Who are you?” The Doctor asked.

“We… aren’t sure. That is why we’re asking you. You said that you’ve seen us before. Tell us what we’re like.” The way the man spoke was odd. For one thing, only his mouth moved. His eyes remained expressionless and his face didn’t shift. For another, each individual word seemed to stand by itself, as though it was taken from the brain, put on the tongue and then withdrawn again. It seemed as though he knew the forms of language but hadn’t quite grasped the spirit.

“You’re the statues.” The Doctor didn’t comment on the fact that he didn’t know of any way that the angels could speak through a human like this. He certainly didn’t comment on the fact that this was yet another person speaking to him in plurals.

“They call us the guardian angels.”

The Doctor paused for a second. “What do you call ourselves?”

“We have no voices. We call ourselves nothing. We say nothing. We only listen.”

“But you’re speaking through… whoever this is.”

“We are a thought that grips his vocal cords. He died long ago – we are merely a thought more powerful than those that still run through his mind. Our words with his voice.”

“He’s a vampire.”

“Yes.”

The Doctor opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again. _They’re waiting for their story, nameless man._ They could wait a little longer. He didn’t know everything, not yet. “Why don’t you tell me about yourselves first?”

“Why? You know us. We saw the way you looked at us, when you arrived in our box. We have heard you speak about us, so many times now. Tell us about ourselves, nameless man.”

“Why did you call me that?”

“Because you have no name. None that we have heard. We told you, nameless man. We listen. We hear everything that happens in this town. We hear every curse, every lie, every threat. We hear every prayer. But not once have we heard your name. Nor have we heard our own. Only your vague allusions. Tell us about ourselves.”

“What do you want to know?”

There was, for the first time, a pause. Previously, the man had made his replies almost before the Doctor had finished speaking. Now there was a hesitation. A tiny, almost imperceptible hesitation, but a hesitation nonetheless. “Did she lie? She said… she said such horrible things about us. We are mewling newborns, nameless man. We know nothing, except for what we hear. And the first thing that we heard upon being born was… she said that we were lonely assassins. That we were supposed to spread fear and terror throughout the universe. Is that true, nameless man? Are we monsters? We have saved… so many from the monsters in this town. We don’t even know how many. We even… we even saved her. Tell us, nameless man, are we doing… did we do the right thing?”

Oh.

This was _her_ town. The blonde. The Beast. Buffy. Whichever. She came from here. She was the sister, the one that the girl with the tired eyes had been scared of. The one that seemed to have scared everyone in this town.

The one who had made, in this place where the entire universe seemed to not exist, a race so cruel and so deadly that they would one day destroy entire worlds.

“Before I do. Before I tell you anything.” The Doctor said slowly. “I have to ask you one question. The vampires. What do you do with them?”

“We touch them. When they are about to feed, we touch them, and for a brief moment…” the man trailed off.

“And?”

“We cannot speak, nameless man. We cannot look at each other. We are, always and forever, entirely alone. Even this man, with his fingers that smell of nicotine and screams, even he is less lonely than us. But when we touch them, for a brief moment, we feel… we do not know the word. We think it is happy.”

The Doctor leans forward intently. “Why?”

“Because they are gone. Because, wherever they go, whatever it is that happens to them, they are lonelier than us. Their world is torn away from them in a blink of an eye, and… we don’t feel as bad.”

They didn’t know. They didn’t even know what happened to people when they touched them. They didn’t know what was happening.

When an angel touched a human, they went back in time. Not far, in the grand scheme of things. Usually not even a hundred years. They lived long enough to see the day that they were touched by an angel, and that was it. The human, if they were lucky, found a new life in the past.

But a vampire? If you sent a vampire back even a hundred years, then it would spend that entire time killing people. The Doctor didn’t have even the slightest clue how often a vampire needed to feed. But send a vampire back a hundred years – even if it only killed one person, then every relative that that person might have had was wiped out in an instant. Their family, their friends – the entire course of their lives would change.

But vampires didn’t age. You could send them back as far as you liked, and they would spend the entire time killing. Thousands, millions of lives changing. And the angels had said that they didn’t even know how many vampires they had touched.

No wonder time was breaking. It was changing, over and over again. Things that should have been fixed no longer were, people whose descendants would have done something hundreds of thousands years later were killed before they could have children. History was falling apart, killed by a thousand cuts.

“Wait… wherever you are. I’m not going to tell you about yourselves. I’m going to show you instead. Wait. I’ll open the door to my… box for you when I’m ready.”

The Doctor went back to his TARDIS. About five minutes later it vanished, and then promptly reappeared again. By this point, there were several angel statues watching it that hadn’t been there earlier.

The door creaked open. The angels went in. The TARDIS flew away.

The TARDIS then not only opened its doors but shifted the gravity, causing the angels to go flying out through the door to land on the world below.

It was not the same world that they had left. It was a barren, molten world, with a sky filled with ash.

A voice, the Doctor’s voice, a recording came blaring from the TARDIS.

“You want me to tell you about yourselves? You are killers. I’ve seen you force a girl to count down the minutes to her death, just because it amused you. I’ve seen you kill a man and use his vocal cords so that you could use him to taunt us. I’ve seen planets that you’ve killed. I’ve heard you laugh while you hunt. And none of that,nothing compares to what you are doing to time. You're killing whole universes, over and over again. So yes. You are monsters, made by a monster. You spread fear and terror across the universe… or at least, you did. But, now, time is so broken that I can take you and put you on this dying world at the end of the universe, where you’ll never be able to harm anyone ever again. You’ll be alone, weeping, right until the universe ends.”

And then the TARDIS faded away, back to Earth, to pick up the Doctor from where it had left him. Five minutes after the angels had entered the TARDIS. Five minutes after the Doctor stopped time from completely falling apart. Five minutes after he left the angels stranded on a dying world in a dying universe.


	7. Coda

_What immortal hand or eye,  
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?_  
-William Blake

~*~

The Doctor didn’t think about what he had done. Not because he felt guilty, or ashamed. He knew that the Weeping Angels were amongst the most dangerous creatures in the universe, and that he had had no choice but to stop them from completely breaking time. To save the universe, he had to stop them.

No, the Doctor didn’t think about what he had done because that hadn't been the first time that he had had to do something like that. There had been a time when he’d have hesitated, when he would have wondered if the evil the Weeping Angels did outweighed the good of people who banded together in the face of it. But he’d stopped being that man a long time ago.

So he didn’t think about it.

The Doctor moved around the TARDIS, flipping switches, pushing buttons, and then a crack opened in the middle of the room, a crack in space, in time, in reality itself. Suddenly the Doctor was elsewhere.

He wasn’t in Sunnydale. He could tell that much. As for where he was… he wasn’t sure about that. Not quite. It looked like some kind of desert, covered in rocks and sand. Everything was a sort of rusty red.

However, at that moment he wasn’t particularly bothered about where he was. He was more concerned with the blonde who was sitting on a particularly large rock in front of him.

“You cheated.” She sounded as though she was admonishing him, but everything about her from her expression to way that she sat told the Doctor that she was amused.

He shrugged. “I do that. Famous for it, as a matter of fact. But if you wouldn’t mind telling me what I'm supposed to have cheated at now…”

“Their story. The angel’s story. I started it, Doctor. You heard what they said. I made them and I told them what they were. But they fought it, like young species tend to do. They thought that maybe they could be better. And then you came, the nameless old man, and you crushed their idealism and condemned them to burn. Not because of what they are, but because of what they could be. You weren’t supposed to look ahead, Doctor. You were just supposed to see what was there and tell them their story based on that.”

The Doctor shrugged again. “One of the perks of being a time traveller.”

The blonde slid off her rock. “We weren’t sure you’d cheat. I thought you might see them in all their boundless naiveté, and they'd remind you of your precious humans. I thought you might be kind. But you're not, Doctor. You saved the world and made it a little bit darker, all at the same time.”

“I just saved the universe.”

She smiled widely, as though he’d just made a joke. “Do you know where we are, Doctor?”

He looked around again. He stuck his tongue out, tasted the air. He felt the flow of time over his skin. He felt the planet turn beneath his feet. “Normally I’d say Mars.”

“Then why don’t you, Doctor? Why don’t you in all your certainty stand there and make a proclamation of what is and isn’t true? Is it because of the air, Doctor? Don’t worry about that. I took care of it. It wouldn’t do for you to suffocate. Or is it something else? Why don’t you tell us, Doctor? Tell the story.”

“There’s no one here. If this is Mars, then there should be pyramids, signs of the Ice Warriors. But there isn’t everything here is…”

“Dead?” The blonde supplied. The Doctor didn’t respond. “Welcome to the universe, Doctor. An exquisite corpse. No life, anywhere, except for a tiny blue planet. A story just waiting to unfold. Isn’t it glorious?”

“You killed-“

“Us? If we wanted the universe to die, we could snuff out every star at once as easy as pinching a candle wick. We could tear it apart like wet paper. Or we could just wait. We’ll be here for the end of the universe, just as I was here for its beginning.”

“Then why is…” the Doctor trailed off. He couldn’t even begin to wrap his head around the idea of a universe suddenly devoid of life. It just didn’t seem possible. She had to be lying. She had to be.

“Maybe you didn’t stop the angels early enough. Maybe the cracks in the universe are just too big. Maybe every creature here saw you coming and got away while you were busy on Earth. Or maybe there was never any life here at all. We offer no answers, Doctor. Only questions. The questions of the moment.” The blonde smiled faintly. “Oh, how we wish you had the wit to understand us. If you remember nothing else, remember that.”

The Doctor blinked. “But that can’t be true. The universe can’t be wiped out like that, it isn’t-“

“This isn’t your universe, Doctor. This is mine. Things are different here. Yours is still out there, the universe of another story.” The blonde paused for a moment. “Eventually, this one will be like yours. Humans will be everywhere. From here to edge of space. And they will look around themselves and feel so small… we wonder how long it will be before they all go mad. We’ll have fun finding out.”

“Why? Why do all of this? What’s the point?”

“What else are you for? All you tiny people and your tiny galaxies. All of you are just tools in our hands. Even you, Doctor. You are something that I’ve made. My immortal hand framed thy fearful symmetry.”

“I met your sister.” The Doctor said suddenly. “Nice girl. Seems-“

The blonde continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “Interesting thing, Doctor. You missed. You thought you were sending them to die at the end of the universe, but you didn’t. You sent them to a primordial world at the beginning of time, and there they’ll stay, starving and so full of rage and loneliness that in the end that will be all they are. And then eventually someone will land on that planet, and the angels will spread, killing wherever they go. And one day, very soon, they’ll kill your friends right in front of you. You’ll never see them again. They’ll just be gone in the space it takes you blink, and you’ll stand there crying in front of their grave. And that, Doctor, is just another part of your story even though it will be the end of theirs. We made you, Doctor, just as you made the angels. We have shaped you and moulded you all your life.”

Then the Doctor was back in his TARDIS as though he had never the left. The only sign that he had been anywhere was a voice echoing in his ears. _Soon, the story will end. Look for us under different circumstances_


End file.
